9     CULTURE AND LIFE IN A FRAGMENTED CITY

Lazy Arabs

In the two years I spent teaching at Qatar University, the institution was undergoing a period of rapid and wholesale change.¹ Nonetheless, over that period of time I developed a deep affection for the university, for my students, and for my colleagues in the Department of Social Sciences. But that affection ought not to obscure the everyday challenges encountered in trying to function as an academic researcher, a teacher, and a productive scholar while employed there. Those challenges occasionally took comic form. For example, although Qatar was (and remains) one of the wealthiest nations in the world on a per capita basis, in my experience the supply of paper at the university was unpredictable and itinerant. Indeed, in that institutional ecosystem it often seemed easier to procure a new US$2,000 printer than a ream of paper needed for making use of that printer. So mid-morning one day in 2009, with a set of in-class exercises needed in a matter of hours, I hopped into my Honda Civic and headed for nearby Landmark Mall to purchase a few reams of paper with money from my own pocket. On this particular day more than a decade ago, I entered the air-conditioned Landmark Mall and encountered an array of coffee shops crowded with Qatari men. As my fieldnotes from later that night suggest, the men were in conversations, reading the newspaper, talking with each other, or perhaps talking on their mobile phones. Many were smoking cigarettes—a newly prohibited behavior in these quasi-public spaces, and at that time, a difficult transgression for the legion of migrant service workers and security guards to attempt to address. In my fieldnotes, I considered why, in the middle of a workday morning, were so many Qatari men not at work. Although it sounds stereotypical and cliché to say it, at that hour in an American mall I would expect to see housewives with infants and, perhaps, a fair number of retirees out for a stroll in a climate-controlled environment. In Qatar, however, the workday shopping mall is full of able-bodied men in their prime. Why were they not at work?

There is nothing particularly adroit about my observational capacities, and indeed, many other expats in the region have made similar observations—sometimes in writing, and more frequently in person—to me and to other expatriates with whom they share some sort of comforting affiliation. At social gatherings among these expats, I frequently encountered a discourse portraying Arab laziness. This discourse is empirically tethered to numerous observations and anecdotal experiences like the one I have described. In stereotypical expatriate sentiment, Arab lassitude is linked to the hydrocarbon-derived wealth of the nation; rather than earning that wealth, Qatar and the other khaleeji states benefitted from the happenstance location of vast hydrocarbon reserves within their borders. These interpretations also reflect the enduring Orientalist discourse so potently identified by Edward Said (1978), who discerned a European tradition that contrasted its own progress with the irrational, lazy, uncivilized, and crude character of the “oriental” (see also Alatas 1977). Nor, in my own experience and research, are these Orientalist perspectives consigned to European and American sources, but are also shared by the many diasporas and various foreign communities who reside in Arabia. Sometimes these sentiments even characterize citizens’ critical assessments of their own society—a notable permutation of what William Mazzarella (2003, 138–141) once referred to as auto-orientalism.²

While the discriminatory logic of Orientalism lodges this purported lassitude as a flaw endemic to some cultural or racial essence of the Arab people, rentier state theory reaches a similar endpoint via a different line of reasoning. Although rentier theory is in the first accounting an economic theory, its extrapolation oftentimes carries analysis into terrain that is clearly sociological in nature and scope. For example, in addition to the other descriptive features of the rentier economy, Hazem Beblawi (1987, 385–386)—one of the theory’s progenitors—also suggested that these economic arrangements produce a rentier mentality, a state of mind premised on, “a break in the work-reward causation. Reward—income or wealth—is not related to work or risk bearing, rather to chance or situation.” In this line of analysis, Arab lassitude is a result of a changing system of incentives manifested in the rentier state. My interests here are in unpacking what Beblawi might have meant by the “situation” that he concludes his assertion with.

First, although there is a thread of reasonable coherence to this explanation, I think it demands reframing. The majority of Qatari citizens work in the public sector. Although the workforce is burgeoning with foreigners, many of those public sector workplaces remain primarily Qatari and operate in Arabic. Workdays in the public sector usually conclude early in the afternoon, while the private sector continues until 5:00 p.m., if not later. For Qataris, time in the afternoons, evenings, and portions of the workday are often devoted to social networking or to time with family. This might include visiting and connecting with friends or colleagues; one might conceive of this time in terms of the accumulation of wasta, the Arabic term for social capital; one might also envision this time in terms of the maintenance of relations with tribe and family. Most modern Qatari households contain a majlis, a room designed specifically for male versions of this social function (Nagy 1997; Al-Mohannadi and Furlan 2022). Although nearly nine of every ten humans on the Qatari Peninsula are foreigners, after their day concludes Qatari citizens most typically return to neighborhoods largely segregated from the foreign population. Some of those suburban neighborhoods are still vaguely organized by kin and extended family, like the fareej of yesteryear that many Qataris now nostalgically idealize (Nagy 2006). In summary, the segmentation of the workforce and the spatial segregation of Qataris from foreign matter in the city together index a different sort of social logic that I am seeking to discern here. What expatriates might read as lassitude is, an active investment in a set of traditional social relations that, in some form, persevere in the modern city.

The men at the shopping mall that I encountered were busy with a different sort of work than I was able to recognize. Through an urban spatial discourse that enclaves foreign matter, and through the self-segregation of the Qatari citizenry to both public sector employment and residential districts in the urban landscape, Qataris have been able to retain some semblance of traditional social relations amid a sea of foreign influence. In the logic of the Qatari domain, tribal affiliation, family reputation, and the wasta an individual has been able to accumulate as a social creature are the currency by which one advances in society. Much of this happens in decidedly Qatari spaces in the city. Notably, this calculus indexes a social logic in which foreigners—as outsiders—are poorly positioned to compete. Qataris’ retention of some modicum of traditional social relations despite such a comprehensive and wholesale embrace of global, neoliberal forces, much of which is close at hand in the city, and in consideration of Qataris’ standing as an outright minority in their city and country—all this suggests that the maintenance of Qatari social coherence is a notable anthropological fact. To see tradition persevere, rather than erode or disappear, suggests that there are mechanisms by which cultural diversity and difference might be retained, even amid the increasing tide of global interconnection that characterizes the contemporary era of mobility. Qatar, and the Qatari people, face demographic circumstances at the frontiers of the global condition. The city itself seems to be an integral tool in this notable achievement. Urban theorists, and those anthropologists who remain committed to social and cultural diversity, should perhaps take note.

Information Brokers in the Fragmented Cultural Landscape

In 2008, I began meeting with Divendra at his labor camp in Doha’s Industrial Area.³ His experiences and perspectives have featured centrally in several of my previously published pieces, and they also commenced this book. Consider another one of those experiences, drawn from a scenario he faced in 2009. In his first stint as a transnational migrant in Qatar, Divendra and the other South Asian laborers at his company faced all sorts of serious problems at the hands of their Palestinian employers. Their problems included the poor conditions of the labor camp to which they were assigned, the nonpayment of promised wages, the extraction of various fees from what salary they did receive, and the stress of navigating several different lawsuits filed by their employers as part of an attempt to discipline the exploited South Asian workforce. Early in these difficulties, Divendra and several fellow workers were able to meet face-to-face with their Qatari sponsor to explain their situation and plead their case to him. After that meeting with him, the worker’s sponsor communicated with the brothers—their employers (whom he also sponsored)—and most of the workers’ problems were quickly resolved. Within months, however, the same issues returned. In this second manifestation, their employers ensured the South Asian workers had no access to their mutual sponsor: they refused to facilitate such contact, and they discontinued the workers’ transportation services. As a result, the workers’ problems endured for the remainder of Divendra’s time in Qatar.

Next, consider a seemingly unrelated experience from that same period. In 2009, I was midway through my service as an assistant professor at Qatar University (see figure 15). In addition to teaching classes, that year I began to work with an institution in Doha on a research project focused on Gulf migration and its impact on the family.⁴ The director and a handful of other personnel at this institute were American, and the draft of my paper was circulated among them for comment and review. Overall, this was a painless process, but eventually my draft’s circulation stopped at the desk of one of the highest-ranking Americans in the institution’s hierarchy. His concerns were manifold. He criticized my use of the term “exploitation” to describe the circumstances some migrants face in the region, for example. After relaying a constellation of other concerns, he warned that a paper of this sort would most certainly raise the ire of “the Qataris.” A series of internal discussions ensued, to which I was not privy, and although the working paper eventually reached publication, it did so under a cloud of his warnings.⁵ As an anthropologist with a particularly long record of researching the lower strata of the migrant workforce present on the Arabian Peninsula, I had heard these sorts of concerns and warnings before. The nature of my research agenda will be unwelcome, I have been told, and over many years, I would need more hands than my own to count the number of people who felt compelled to inform me of the risks I would face. In 2021, I conveyed the essence of this experience to a fellow researcher and colleague of African descent. Despite our different backgrounds, and despite the notably different institutional ecosystems we occupy, he reported a variety of similar interactions over a decade of research focused on transnational labor migration. We laughed and concurred on one other important point: those warnings always came from other foreigners.

My experience as a privileged foreign professor at Qatar University and Divendra’s experience as a labor migrant in Doha’s Industrial Area were extraordinarily different. But these vignettes also share some ground, and there are two aspects therein that help illuminate the social and cultural terrain of urban Arabia. First, both of these scenarios reflect the segmented and segregated social terrain of the city. Differences—in class, culture, nationality, race, and language—are maintained and reinforced by the enclaves, the compartmentalization of foreign matter, and, broadly, the segregation resulting from the urban spatial discourse I have described. Moreover, these differences are arranged hierarchically, and the quotidian tasks of life in this social terrain require frequent communication across those thresholds of difference. Divendra reported his challenges to his Palestinian employers, for example, and eventually pleaded his fellow workers’ concerns to his Qatari sponsor. In my case, the mostly American institutional sponsors of my research were speculatively concerned with what the Qataris who funded their institution might think, or perhaps more precisely, what they imagined that they might think about my research agenda.

Here I want to point to the dominant role that the human imagination plays in this social terrain. In a short paper published several years later, for example, I collated and analyzed a set of urban legends that I had heard in my many conversations with migrant workers in their labor camps (Gardner 2012a). The tall tales and the worrisome stories that proliferated among working-class migrants there were often about Qataris and the mysteries of Qatari culture. In my analysis, I suggested that the proliferation of these myths and legends, and the often-preposterous falsehoods that they trucked in, were premised on the fact that none of the migrants retelling these urban legends had any firsthand knowledge or experience with the Qatari citizenry. The things they imagined about Qataris reflected the fact that they knew no Qataris. Similarly, most of the Americans evaluating my draft paper had little firsthand contact with any Qataris. Instead, they were left to speculate about that mysterious Qatari otherness from afar, from across the thresholds of cultural difference instantiated in the urban landscape. Qatari preferences, concerns, and attitudes were not something most of these foreigners frequently encountered or with which they commonly engaged. Rather, they were left to imagine the cultural terrain beyond the thresholds that separated them.

My point here should be clear. In the insular social terrain fostered by the city, and by the urban spatial discourse underpinning it, this is to be expected. In this superdiverse city, the absence of sustained cultural interaction with otherness is often the norm.⁶ But this description also points to the second thesis threaded through these vignettes. The insular, segregated, segmented social terrain described here cultivates a particular sort of social entrepreneur—a go-between, a gatekeeper of sorts. In the ethnographic canon, these social actors are commonly referred to as brokers. These social actors received a spate of attention linked to the vast decolonization projects around the world. For example, Eric Wolf’s illuminating work (1956, 1076–1077) described brokers as Janus-like—turned in two directions at once—and readily identifiable for their capacity to “stand guard over the crucial junctures or synapses of the relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole.” Johan Lindquist (2015, 2) revisited this lost strand of the ethnographic canon and provided a revised and updated definition of the broker: “a specific type of middleman, mediator, or intermediary … the broker is a human actor who gains something from the mediation of valued resources that he or she does not directly control, which shall be distinguished from a patron who controls valued resources, and a go-between or a messenger, who does not affect the transaction.” In the fragmented city, a legion of foreigners has arisen around the exchange of valuable information across the thresholds of cultural difference that comprise the social terrain of the city.

But there is more to this. The experiences I have related here point not only to these foreigners’ roles as gatekeepers or brokers—whose powers are built on governing the movement of information across these thresholds of difference and, inevitably amid this multicultural hierarchy, up and down the hierarchies of power—but also to their function as imagineers.⁷ At key junctures of communication and in the exchange of information up and down the social hierarchies characteristic of these plural and superdiverse societies, brokers not only regulate the communication of information for their own personal gain (as in Divendra’s case) but are also continually engaged in estimating, guessing, evaluating, and portraying what might be culturally or socially appropriate to those atop this social hierarchy. This assertion rests on the social fact that while these brokers may or may not share ethnicity, class, and/or religion with their hierarchical superiors, they often have little substantial insight or contact with the inner workings of Qatari society, or with others above them this social hierarchy. This, in turn, is a result of the urban spatial discourse, the segregation it encourages, and the insularity that predominates in this social terrain.⁸ It is in the gap between reality and its representation that the power of the human imagination takes form.

In my experience, it is often an imagined set of interests, aspirations, and concerns that characterizes these imagineers’ portrayal of khaleeji society. In the scenarios that commenced this section, the imagined interests and concerns of Qataris presented by these gatekeeping imagineers were disabused by Qataris themselves—by the citizen-colleagues I collaborated with at Qatar University, for example, or by the Qatari sponsor who fielded and momentarily resolved Divendra’s concerns. To be clear: these brokers’ portrayals of Qatari (or other Gulf nationals’) concerns with my research agenda were, almost always, starkly different from the tenor of my own encounters and interactions with Qatari citizens, in both official and unofficial capacities. What this points to is the often-significant difference between Qatari interests and their portrayal by these imagineers. Behind those boundaries and thresholds of difference are humans in all their social complexity. But the terrain of this imaginary can compound and exaggerate those differences. As I speculated years ago, this imagineering opens the door for a host of stereotypes, essentializations, and the zombie Orientalisms that still stagger through great swaths of contemporary analysis, often in disguise.⁹ Speculation aside, we might conclude more straightforwardly that, in this fragmented and hierarchical social milieu, prone as it is to insularity, and configured to maintain cultural difference, the social imaginary seems to play an outsized role. This condition seems rooted in the urban landscape of the city itself.

Interstitial Urban Space

My goal for this chapter is to illuminate noteworthy aspects of the social and cultural assemblages that arise in the urban landscape that I have sought to describe in this book. I now turn my attention to the urban spaces of the city, and to a particular sort of urban space that I believe merits attention. What I term interstitial urban space is a form of what Barron (2014) has called “terrains vagues”—the loose spaces, abandoned parcels, uncertain properties, and other tracts of urban space into which urban social life inevitably spills (see figure 13 and figure 16). I use interstitial urban space to describe the margins and seams of the urban spatial discourse described in previous chapters.

My interest in this sort of space traces back more than a decade (Gardner 2009). In my first year of residence in Doha, my notebook began to steadily accumulate an increasing number of fieldnotes concerned with the city itself. Notably, at that juncture the city was still new to me, and as a result, features of urban life that would soon become everyday, commonplace, and quotidian—and thereby slip past my notice—still caught my attention. One of the threads woven through many of these experiential jottings concerned moving about the city, and my various attempts to grapple with the peculiarities of my experiences. Although this fieldnote is somewhat exemplary, it is also a jotting in which time is askew; in its iteration, the fieldnote was a retrospective recollection of an experience I had earlier in my family’s residence in Doha. But, with that caveat in mind, the fieldnote also conveys a key aspect of life in the fragmented and complicated urban landscape of contemporary Doha.

Like many other transnational families of Qatar’s upper middle class, during our residence in Doha my small family and I sometimes spend our weekend mornings at one of the brunches offered by the numerous hotels recently constructed in the city. Early in our stay in what was still a new city to us, we selected the Mövenpick hotel for what we hoped would become part of a weekly ritual. One might be hard-pressed to distinguish the new Mövenpick amid the sprouting skyline in the city center—after all, it is merely one astonishing postmodern building among many in the opulent junkspace of contemporary Arabia. Our trip to the hotel involved several detours through the city center’s streets, nearly all of which were under construction. We finally made our way to a hardpan dirt parking lot adjacent to the hotel. With our young daughter in tow and a steep wind blowing dust in all directions, we encountered minor difficulties in traversing a short chain fence, heaps of discarded cinder blocks, an abandoned pile of sand, and a miscellany of construction debris and garbage on our journey from the car to the hotel’s front door.

In terms of the human senses, the inside of the hotel presented a stark contrast to our experiences outside. The air was frigid. The lobby was sleek and modern, sparsely furnished, with clean lines and contemporary art, and we were quickly guided to an elevator that whisked us to the child-friendly and ostentatious brunch that had attracted us in the first place. Since that time, I’ve come to pay more and more attention to these thresholds, and to the sloppy and difficult interstitial spaces in this city and the other cities of the Arabian Peninsula—to the piles of cinder blocks, construction debris, abandoned vehicles, sidewalks that meander to nowhere, and to the forgotten in-between spaces of the Gulf city. In part, it’s because as a denizen of Doha one spends so much time passing back and forth across thresholds dividing the polished, stylized, and antiseptic modernity that is de rigueur in the contemporary Gulf, and the chaotic dishevelment that seems to occupy these interstitial spaces. The contrast is stark. If one simply pays attention, one realizes how common this experience is in all the cities of the Gulf.

Over more than a century, urban theorists have described cities in terms of the wondrous social fabric that results from the density of our urban inhabitations.¹⁰ That density—our togetherness with strangers and the various bonuses of proximity—are the gravitational core of the urban milieu. But the urban social fabric that results from those milieux is a variable to be analyzed and explored. From one angle, this fieldnote helps clarify the paramount and significant presence of thresholds and boundaries of difference in Doha’s urban landscape. In a city replete with foreigners and with foreign matter; in a city that has grown by a capital-intensive urban spatial discourse and the expansive units of urban development that fuel it; in a city in which unfettered access to the internet, or alcoholic beverages, or coeducational classrooms, or the ownership of property, or Christian churches, or vast contingents of fellow migrant countrymen are consigned to specific enclaves and designated urban spaces—in this city, that social fabric is disjointed and fragmentary. It is a mosaic of difference, akin to patterns we might discern in other urban landscapes, perhaps. But Doha is also unlike those other cities in terms of the prominence and proliferation of these enclaved spaces in the urban landscape. In the enclaves and planned spaces that make up this urban landscape, the attention—of planners, inhabitants, officials, visitors, and others—is perennially directed inward, and there is little attention to how a parcel or building “in fact connects (or fails to connect) with other buildings and populations” (Nastasi 2019, 100). At the margins of the computer-generated images that promote the plethora of Doha’s urban projects, for example, the landscape becomes foggy and indistinct, and typically fades into nothingness. Those spaces at the margins of projects and plans are my quarry here.

In the fieldnote, what caught my attention for the first time was the space just outside the boundaries of those parcels, enclaves, and urban spaces—the foggy nothingness visible at the margins of many promotional images and scale models of the city (see figure 11). From then forward, I began to pay attention to those spaces in between other things in the urban landscape. In the original fieldnote, I mentioned detritus, garbage, and construction debris; in the ensuing years, using my camera and my notebook, I began to expand the list of what one might encounter just outside compound walls, or just beyond the boundaries of a property, or past the last building on the last block. That list came to include abandoned vehicles; a plethora of tires and all sorts of assorted garbage; abandoned watercraft; numerous signs, including many that explicitly prohibit dumping, trespassing, or lingering; graffiti, recorded by my camera with notable frequency; and quite a bit more. Carrying this idea from Doha back to Tacoma, Washington (the city in which I make my home), I also came to recognize that these interstitial urban spaces were locations where invasive plant species also seemed to flourish. In Tacoma, these invasive species included scotch broom (cytisus scoparius) and the himalaya blackberry (rubus armeniacus), the latter of which produces an edible and sometimes-welcome fruit. Regardless, in my thinking, this rambunctious list of miscellany and whatnot eventually coalesced as a list of indicators—indicators that signaled the presence of interstitial urban space.

To better document this sort of space and to better grapple with its significance, I began to devote more time to these urban explorations—to dérives that might help me better experientially engage these spaces and perhaps better understand them. In Tacoma, those endeavors carried me under freeways, along the margins of property lines near the historic waterfront, and to the seams and interstices of tenure interlacing the urban landscape. I became increasingly aware that this interstitial urban space was entering a period of intensifying use in America. As economic inequality in the United States increased, society’s most marginal elements—the homeless American lumpenproletariat—slowly began to accumulate in these interstitial urban spaces. In cities on America’s West Coast, many of these interstitial urban spaces became, essentially, busy urban camps. In Doha, I also noticed the intensifying use of interstitial urban space, albeit by different sorts of people. For example, in 2019 I visited one of the bachelor cities on the periphery of Doha. One portion of the empty stretch of the desert beyond its walls was piled high with garbage and detritus—indicative of interstitial urban space, in my calculus. On that particular Friday, it was also crowded with thousands of migrant men (see figure 16). They were cooking, drinking, cutting hair, selling this and that, gambling, and socializing, all in what is popularly called the “Friday Market” that takes shape once a week in this interstitial urban space. Beyond the densely packed market area, various groups of men played cricket on other parcels, in the spaces beyond the walls of the bachelor city and whatever comes next on the desert’s near horizon, be it a road, a factory, a construction site, or another bachelor city (see figure 13).

In both Doha and Tacoma, this interstitial urban space had clear and observable social utility. In neither case was the whole of society present. Rather, in both cases it was marginal and disenfranchised social elements that seemed to make use of this interstitial urban space. This resonated with other familiar ethnographic work. In 1989, the anthropologist James Holston published his heralded ethnography of Brasilia, titled The Modernist City. Holston documents the construction of Brazil’s new capital in the 1960s. The city, constructed on a parcel carved from the forest, was an attempt at a whole planned city, the grandest feat of social engineering, and in the context of that era, a tabula rasa for the monumental ambitions of modernist urban planners at the apex of the twentieth-century high modernism. Despite the steady hand of several of the world’s leading urban planners, and despite the intricate and detailed energies that were devoted to erecting the new capital city, Holston’s ethnography helps the reader take stock of the human incapacity to socially engineer and implement such a comprehensive urban whole. Even before Brasilia was complete, for example, unplanned shantytowns had formed at its periphery. Informal markets blossomed on street corners, people took to park squares and other urban spaces, and commercial districts sprouted outside the city. Informal, irregular, and unplanned activity was a constant. Here we might take note: various urban inhabitants, many of whom were not stakeholders in the original plans, engaged in unplanned activities in spaces planned for other uses. In Brasilia, it was perhaps inevitable that real urban social life proved too liquid and too unruly for the city envisioned and erected in the high modernist image. That is at least one lesson we might take from Holston’s ethnography.

As another insightful urbanist, Marc Augé (2009), suggested, what we see in contemporary cities like Doha—what he termed “supermodernism”—appears to be a continuation of the patterns and the penchants of twentieth-century high modernism. That is the postmodern conundrum—that the past, and its problems, are endlessly recycled and forever with us. Gargantuan urban parcels are the planning norm in Doha, and whatever those urban spaces’ flaws may be, those gargantuan urban parcels are accompanied by gargantuan swaths of interstitial urban space. In Doha, as well as in other cities I have investigated, this form of urban space seems to be under frequent and steady social use. Numerous ethnographic cases suggest it is the more marginal elements of society that utilize this interstitial urban space (Constable 1997; Wu and Canham 2008; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Menoret 2014; Elsheshtawy 2019b). As others suggested, good urban planning works best when the results are organic and flexible enough to accommodate the unforeseen (Scott 1999; Kolson 2001). Richard Sennett (1970) wrote that only by abandoning the penchant for preplanning, control, and our ongoing attempts to socially engineer life in the city might we meaningfully engage our human capacities and become fully aware of each other.¹¹

The informal urbanism that spills into the interstitial urban spaces described here is a testament to the incapacity of supermodernist urban planning to encompass the unruly realities of human social life. In the capital-intensive and tribal authoritarian context of the Arabian Peninsula, it seems likely that the tensions between the energies devoted to urban planning and the unruly realities of human social life will remain defining elements of these cities’ futures.

Concluding Thoughts

The three ethnographic excursions that make up this chapter were intended to help readers better glimpse the social and cultural terrain of life in the city of Doha. They are partial glimpses, of course, but each of them speaks to the unique social fabric one encounters in the city. On the one hand, the patterns of this social fabric resemble the city that the urban theorist Christopher Alexander (1977, 44) envisioned many decades ago—“a city made up of a large number of subcultures relatively small in size, each occupying an identifiable place and separated from other subcultures by a boundary of nonresidential land”—a pattern that he termed a “mosaic of subcultures.” Harvey (1989, 87) added that these cultural enclaves, zones, and quarters were often associated with strong migration streams, which Doha’s experience seems to corroborate. On the other hand, the pattern of the social fabric I have described seems akin to the technoburbs that Robert Fishman (1987, 203) first described just a decade after Alexander. Fishman saw an urban landscape that was little more than a haphazardly planned jumble of discordant urban elements, “fragments in a fragmented environment,” as he phrased it. The urban character of Doha, I suggest, lies somewhere between the polarity of Alexander’s urban mosaic and this Fishman’s fragmentation.